The fabric of technology companies in Catalonia continues to expand. According to a report prepared by Acció, the agency for business growth of the Department of Business and Labor of the Generalitat, the Principality had 402 deep technology startups at the close of 2025. This is the first time that more than 400 businesses of this profile have been registered in the country. The figure represents a growth of 7.5% compared to the previous year.

The Consorci de la Zona Franca de Barcelona has strengthened its influence among international free trade zones with the appointment of its general director as vice president of the AZFA. For its part, Banc Sabadell has deepened its roots in Catalonia with a new territorial advisory council formed by renowned business leaders, and the technology center Eurecat has renewed its general management. Consum has reorganized its executive structure, while the Barcelona Comerç association has elected a new president.

The latest round of results from the major US tech companies has eroded market euphoria for artificial intelligence (AI). Companies on the scale of Amazon and Alphabet (Google's parent company) have made investors' knees shake because of their spending forecasts on computing infrastructure, which much of the market considers excessive. Even Microsoft, which has managed to save face with positive cash generation, has been far from the stock market exaltation that the giants associated with AI had experienced.

Talent Arena, the event dedicated to digital talent held within the framework of the Mobile World Congress, will return to Barcelona for its third edition with the presence of companies on the scale of Google, Mistral, or the open AI platform Hugging Face. This was announced this Thursday by the Mobile World Capital foundation, the organizer of the sessions.

Europe continues to look for ways to deepen its technological sovereignty, both on Earth and in space. And it does so, to a great extent, from Barcelona: this Tuesday, Indra signed two contracts with the European Space Agency (ESA) for the design and development of the ground stations for the new generation of the Galileo project, the European global satellite navigation system, comparable to the North American GPS, and to which 5 billion devices are already connected.

Foment del Treball has reiterated at the gala of its nineteenth annual awards the rejection of the general strike for the right to housing on November 11th. The president of the employers' association, Josep Sánchez Llibre, has questioned its usefulness in addressing what he considers to be the main problems of the residential market. "Let's not fool ourselves: paralyzing companies does not build homes," he snapped. The strike, he observed, shifts "to all companies the cost of a conflict that requires the involvement of many institutions"; a grievance that "is not reasonable." In the same vein, he labeled the call as "deeply misguided, untimely, irresponsible, and harmful."

Catalan small and medium-sized enterprises are in good health. This is demonstrated by the latest edition of the Yearbook of the Catalan SME, prepared each year by the business association Pimec. According to the data in the document, presented by the organization this Monday, the smaller-sized companies in the Principality managed in 2024 to narrow the productivity gap that has historically separated them from larger businesses. According to the report, the country's small and medium-sized enterprises increased their productivity by 2.7%, to an average of 74,355 euros per employee; while large ones recorded a slight decline in the same year, of 0.1%, to 93,405 euros per worker.

The Catalan Institute of Finance is renewing part of its board with four relevant appointments within the country's business ecosystem. Meanwhile, Renault Trucks Iberia announces who will be its new general manager for Spain and Portugal, while Cegasa Energía incorporates a brand new product development director. In the international ecosystem, the online fashion platform Zalando hires an ex-Amazon and Uber executive to occupy the senior vice presidency of B2B.

Since the launch of the first ChatGPT models, Catalan companies have looked at artificial intelligence with curiosity. Adoption has been, according to several studies, rapid but lacking order: according to a report prepared by OpenAI itself, creator of the famous chatbot, 96% of small and medium-sized Catalan companies already use AI in some area of their business. However, nearly 40% declare that they still do not have a formal policy for using it.

The "backbone of the web" faltered yesterday. The publication of two serious vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language on which 70% of the internet's web pages are based, has shaken governments, companies, and users around the world. After administrations in multiple countries decided to halt the service of many of their pages while waiting for the update that was supposed to resolve the two problems, attempts to exploit these weaknesses have multiplied. According to the CEO of the cloud services firm Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, the announcement has triggered "millions" of cyberattack attempts exploiting the weaknesses exposed in PHP. "In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, we saw thousands of attempts to exploit them. They jumped to tens of thousands in the following 45 minutes, and now they are in the millions," explained Prince in a post on his page on the social network X.

Catalonia retains the throne of technology transfer through companies in the State. This is revealed by the third edition of the report on the ecosystem of spin-offs of deep technologies in Spain, published this Thursday by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona foundation. The document detects up to 1,014 spin-off companies –that is, businesses created from scientific research in research centers, universities and other institutions– active in the Spanish fabric at the close of 2025; a year-on-year increase of 4.6%. Of these, 290 are Catalan, 28.5% of the entire ecosystem, and they generate 2,885 highly specialized jobs.

Esteve CDMO, the Contract Development and Manufacturing Organization (CDMO) business of the Catalan pharmaceutical company, will invest 80 million dollars, equivalent to a little over 71 million euros, in a new production plant in China. This was announced in a statement this Wednesday, in which they detail that the move will serve to undertake the "relocation, expansion, and modernization" of its operations in the Asian giant.

The last few days have seen relevant appointments in some of the most prominent multinational companies operating in the State. Ford has announced the renewal of its presidency and executive management, which will become effective in December. Mango has announced a new head of personnel, an executive with a long career within the Catalan fashion giant. On the other hand, the baton of the presidency of the solidarity commission of the Terrassa-based employers' association Cecot has been passed on, and the law firm Osborne Clarke has added a new partner.

In an autumn marked by the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence, Europe seemed far from any seat of power. Just a few weeks away from the predictable mega-IPO of Anthropic, and still with the echoes of the controversy over the technology's safety that shook the United States in September, the Twenty-Seven have moved a relevant piece for the first time in recent years. At the beginning of October, Mistral, the French benchmark for AI –the only European player mentioned in the conversation of the most advanced models– launched its latest model, Mistral Large 4, also known "very officially" as le Chonk.

The main international economic institutions have taken good note of the alarms regarding the safety of artificial intelligence that have been unleashed during the summer. The latest to demonstrate this has been the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva. In an intervention during the annual meetings of the monetary institution and the World Bank, which are being held this week in Bangkok, Georgieva has called for regulation and oversight of the technology by the main industry players. "Without safeguards, risks may outweigh opportunities," the director stated.

Catalonia, whenever there is a forum, shows off its capacity to innovate. Startups, hubs digital, international investments; are increasingly finding their home in the Principality. The technology figures, however, quantify a multitude of projects that, in the words of ARA's director, Esther Vera, "work to seek not very complex solutions to very complex problems". To give a voice—and bestow some well-deserved laurels—to a handful of these initiatives, the newspaper celebrated this Thursday the first edition of the FAR awards, dedicated to technology with an impact on society; in fields as diverse as education, health, or environmental preservation. The evening was hosted by journalists Laura Rosel and Cristina Sáez.

Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech, the Catalan quantum computing company that ranks among the European leaders in its sector, announced this Wednesday an initial closing of its Series A funding round, valued at 19.6 million euros. This first operation was led by defense giant Indra, which invested 10 million euros through IndraMind, the group's technological initiative that develops sovereign artificial intelligence. It also served for the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT), the investment vehicle of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function, to double down on its commitment to the company with a new investment of 9.6 million.

Globalization and the rise of remote work have reformulated the linguistic component of the Catalan labor market. This is revealed by a study from Pimec and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) presented this very Tuesday, which points out that English now surpasses Catalan as the language in which job offers are published in the country. In fact, this has been happening since the pandemic: 2020 was the last year in which there were still more job proposals written in Catalan than in English, according to the same barometer.

The stock market debut of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is one of the most anticipated events of the year. Just months after the record broken by thepublic market entry of SpaceX, Elon Musk's aerospace and artificial intelligence brand, the company led by Dario Amodei could post even more spectacular figures: while Musk managed to list with a valuation of 1.77 trillion dollars, everything suggests that its competitor could reach two trillion. This is anticipated by the initial public offering (IPO) document, leaked by the Reuters agency. The same agency recently pointed out that the IPO could be resolved after the midterm elections in the United States, scheduled for November 3rd.

The banking sector is the protagonist of a good part of the week's appointments. The World Bank has renewed its financial management and the Galician entity Abanca has incorporated a well-known face in Southern European finance to the board of directors of its insurance subsidiary. Outside the banking world, the media tandem formed by streamer Ibai Llanos and former footballer Gerard Piqué enters a new business. At the same time, Just Eat appoints a new financial director for Spain and the OBBIO association renews its board with a new president.